Supporting a reliable citation standard for the internet

With the rise of the internet as a source of information, researchers have struggled with citation standards for referencing source documents. An EU-funded project is developing a solution for European and global e-research infrastructures to enable more open science.

Supporting a reliable citation standard for the internet

With the rise of the internet as a source of information, researchers have struggled with citation standards for referencing source documents. An EU-funded project is developing a solution for European and global e-research infrastructures to enable more open science.

For many years, academics and archivists worked to develop standard practices for the citation of paper-based documents, so that readers could find sources mentioned in footnotes or bibliographies.

In todays web-based society, the concept of the persistent identifier (PID), or a long-lasting reference to a document, has become a problem. Studies have shown that within a few years of being cited, a significant percentage of web addresses have expired. The goal of the EU-funded FREYA consortium is to create a robust environment for PIDs.

FREYA is capitalising on the success of the EU-funded THOR project, which established interoperability between existing resources, linking digital identifiers across platforms. It is also building on the core services of existing, trusted PID systems, developing them in the context of established community-based services and more widely through the European Open Science Cloud.

FREYA services cover a wide range of resources across the research and innovation landscape. The project is enhancing the links between them so that they can be exploited in many disciplines and research frameworks.

The project has three main components. The PID Graph connects and integrates PID systems to create an information map of relationships across PIDs, providing a basis for new services. The PID Forum is a stakeholder community whose members collectively oversee the development and deployment of new PID types.

Finally, the PID Commons addresses the sustainability of the PID infrastructure resulting from FREYA beyond the lifetime of the project itself, by defining the roles, responsibilities and structures for good self-governance based on consensual decision-making. The result is a more accessible and reliable e-research space, helping to enable open science to benefit everyone.